pumpkinstrokemarrow

Well, having been there, I am happy to report that the presentation of this World Heritage Site (see http://whc.unesco.org/. From which I learn that Stonehenge's nearest rival in UNESCO-speak is in Korea) is much better than I had thought. The visitor centre is a bit thin for a site of this importance, but access to the henge is OK. I had thought that one was restricted to a circular walk a hundred yards or so from the henge itself but I find myself quite wrong. In the first place the circular walk is not that far from the henge and in the second place the circular walk is not circular: the first portion runs inside the primary embankment and gets one quite close enough to the stones to be impressed. And, as it happened, the day we visited was watering day, with the turf at the very centre of the henge actually being watered.

According to the two trusties on duty (the henge being a combined services operation for English Heritage and the National Trust), the path has not been moved for twenty years or so. So either my memory of a circular and remote walk is defective, possibly fuelled by regular sight of people trudging around it from the A303, or we last visited the place more than 20 years ago, at which time the walk really was circular.

And furthermore, despite the wide and long path we have, the grass was very worn, at a time of year when one might have thought it should have been at its peak. So I accept that a short path would get badly eroded. It would also get very crowded, judging by the number of people there around 1000 one fine morning in late April. So I stand corrected. The path arrangements are OK.

Our exit was marked by the sight of the second swallow of the year. The first having been a bit further west, a day or so previously.

Decided that the rather small shop did not improve on our book by Dr. Burl, so settled instead for the current guide. So we now have the 1959 guide from the Ministry of Works (including a substantial fold out map), price 1 shilling, the 1980 Pitkin guide, price unknown and the 2005 English Heritage guide, price £4.99. They are all quite well produced things; not exactly complementary, but interesting to have all three nonetheless. We learn on the way that one of Dr. Burl's middle names is Woodruff and we wonder whether he has any connection with the Lyme Regis ones.

On the way home got to thinking about Egypt. The henge is from roughly the same time as some of the comparably large monuments in Egypt, monuments which share an interest in management of the dead. But monuments which were supported, I would have thought, by a rather richer agriculture than that of the high chalk downs of Wiltshire. Clearly room for a UNESCO funded analysis of outlay around the world and over the millennia on funerary ware as a proportion of GDP.

And then moved onto possibilities for the visitor centre. Today I favour having a working replica. Find a suitable site within a mile or so of the henge itself and then get a team of luvvies who will pay English Heritage to be allowed to erect a replica of the henge using tools and materiel of the time. The idea would be that they would kick off at sunrise on the Spring equinox and finish at sunset on the Autumn equinox, with the winter period being allowed for putting the replica site back to its starting position, ready for the next round. The luvvies would be required to live in period costume, to live in period accommodation and to put up with being gawped at. Proper Big Brother stuff. Recreational substances would be permitted when they were not actually on set. Serious penalties for missing the Autumn equinox. Random selection of a miss related number of luvvies for televised sacrifice?

One would need to do a bit of work to find out in what state to deliver the stones and how far from the replica henge to dump them. Get this right and construction would run, as desired, from equinox to equinox.

PS: the heritage people presumably had no control over the statue erected in front of the nearby Holiday Inn at Solstice Park. A rather ugly Neanderthal affair, with the kneeling, rather furry looking man maybe 10 foot high, rather in the style of a lot of French or Spanish outdoor figure sculpture. But one which overlooks the fact that the people who built Stonehenge were more or less the same as us, albeit a bit thinner and smaller on account of their uncertain diet. Not like gorillas at all.